Father Figure
by Tolakasa
Summary: AU. Two years after Mary's death, a stranger has a favor to ask of John Winchester.
1. Chapter 1

**Father Figure**

The headstone was new and raw, though grass had taken root over the grave. It had taken him these two years to find the money for it, between learning, training, hunting.

Hunting.

John Winchester was a hunter now, but new, and still untried, as far as most of their select community was concerned. A man with nothing to lose was dangerous; a man who _had_ lost everything more so; a man who had lost everything but still held tight to a single impossible quest—

Well, Missouri didn't call him stubborn for nothing. And he _was_ learning, quickly, and he would learn _more_, from anyone who cared to teach it, and he would _find_ the—the _thing_ that had killed Mary and their unborn child and kill it. And then kill it _again_.

He was losing his capacity for tears, after all these months; the things he had seen had hardened him. Becoming a warrior, Missouri said, not just a man. She always had to put a fancy spin on things, that woman.

But it wasn't rain that he swiped from his cheek as he headed for the car.

The Impala was home, and sanctuary, and all that was his. The title was in another man's name, but then, he was collecting identities like rich old men collected coins. It was transportation, and held an astonishing amount of weaponry in the trunk. He slid into the driver's seat, automatically checking his surroundings—new habit that, hard-bought, and he had a couple of scars—

"John."

He yelped and jumped and hit his head on the roof. "_Shit!_" he shouted, a reflex he hadn't yet trained out of himself, and he fumbled for the holster tacked to the door—

"Sorry," the apparition said, a bit sheepishly. "I didn't mean to startle you."

His jaw dropped.

It was a woman, all in white—even her hair was white, long and straight and as white as the moon, but her eyes—_all_ of her eyes, including the part that should be white—were pitch-black, bottomless. There was a glow about her that made him want to trust her, that triggered every fatherly instinct—

_You're not a father,_ the cynical hunter-side of his brain reminded him. _You have no fatherly instincts, and this is a ruse._

"What are you?" he demanded, thinking that he was going to beat Isaac bloody. That spell was supposed to _protect_ the car, dammit!

"Just a woman," she said. Her fingers twined nervously about themselves, and that nearly settled the matter; few hostile beings showed their nervousness. "I need to ask you a favor."

"Not until—"

"My name is Willow Rosenberg," she said. He raised an eyebrow; she sure as hell didn't _look_ like a Rosenberg. "Missouri suggested you."

"Missouri?" He relaxed a bit. "What favor?"

"Go here," she said, and a scrap of paper appeared in her hand. She set it carefully on the dash. "I can meet you there." She vanished.

"What favor?" he repeated, but she didn't reappear. He reached for the scrap of paper—notebook paper, interesting—and found coordinates on it.

"Shit," he muttered. Missouri kept sending odd jobs his way, but never before via ghosts. Was this some new phase of training? Or just one of the woman's practical jokes?

"Got nothing better to do," he finally muttered, and started the car.

* * *

"Here" turned out to be in California, of all places, in a clearing in the woods outside a teensy town called Sunnydale. Willow was there when he arrived, and though she was still all in white, and still had the disturbing eyes, she seemed more solid, less ethereal—confirming his suspicion that the apparition in his car had been precisely that. She sat on the ground next to a lumpy blanket, looking up at the leaf canopy with those unnatural eyes and humming to herself. 

"I'm here," he said flatly in greeting, making sure she saw the pistol. She grinned, an honest-to-God grin that meant none of his weapons would so much as muss her hair, and rose gracefully to her feet.

"I knew you would."

"What's the favor? I'm missing out on—"

"You're not missing any hunting of consequence. And you won't find the demon's trail again for six months." His jaw dropped; how did she— "You haven't realized yet?" she asked. "I'm out of time. As in, not in mine. Just visiting. That's why the White Goddess outfit, because this is taking so much power."

Time travel. Great. Just when he thought he'd seen everything. "Past or future?" She quirked an eyebrow, and he realized how stupid the question had been; she'd already given him the answer, when she told him how long it would take to find the demon's trail. "Okay, you've done your research. You're from the future. What the hell do you want with me?"

In reply, Willow waved her hand, and the blanket gently rolled itself back. Lying beneath it, curled on another blanket in bespelled sleep, were two little boys.

"Their mother is a—a hunter, you would call her. Not like you, but the same goal. I'm her best friend, and I work with her, on the magical end of operations."

"Witch."

"Exactly." His fingers itched to reach for the gun—but white was usually symbolic of purity, Missouri kept telling him that, and purity meant good, and besides, there were no telltales of evil witchcraft about. He'd give her a few more minutes. "But nobody's invincible. There was an attack she couldn't defend—"

"Bastard raped her," he guessed. Most of the demons he'd run into so far only _ate_ humans. Luckily.

"Worse than that," she said. "He took the appearance—by which I mean, he _became_—her father." John spat a profanity that Mary would have slapped him for saying within a mile of a child. "She got pregnant, and she had twins—"

"The one's years older," he interrupted. "No way—"

"Things are not what they seem," she said, running over his words in a soft voice that had all the power of a semi behind it. "They were not a natural birth; their growth was accelerated. A year in a month. And then—" She shuddered. "The evil of the father was reborn in one of them."

"Which?" He eyed the boys speculatively. Surely they had the weapons to deal with this in the future, and didn't need one of _his_ guns to kill the brat.

"I'm not telling you that," she snapped. "I tried everything, but only constant erasing of their memories kept them from—from progressing. And Buf—their mother is traumatized, and has other responsibilities, and keeping them is getting in the _way_."

"You kidnapped them."

"I had no choice!" she wailed, her fists clenching. "We _need_ Buffy! We need her _whole_ and _undamaged_, the whole world does, and she can't heal with them there!"

"You took them away from their _mother!_"

"It was that, or Gi—somebody was going to kill them, to contain the power, and I promised her it wouldn't happen. That I wouldn't let it. And this is all I have the power to do. Take them far away from her. So far that they'll never know. Find them new parents."

"_Parents?_" He grasped the plan in an instant, and for the first time in months he laughed—a heartfelt belly laugh, so rare these days that it _hurt_. "Are you _stupid?_ I'm a hunter now! I don't have a wife or a home! And I'm not going to have another one! I am going to find the _thing_ that killed her and—"

"These are the sons of a hunter more powerful than you can ever _dream_ of being," Willow told him, "and no matter how you hunt, you will never defeat the demon that killed Mary."

"I _will_—"

"No, you won't. But Buffy can. Buffy _will_. But not if she doesn't heal. And the power that is within them—it has to be _channeled_, John, or else…. Something like the demon that killed Mary could _take_ it. It could kill thousands more Marys. It could make the one go evil again. And the kind of evil that is in him is the kind that can destroy the world. They have to be raised and trained properly, and a hunter can do that."

"I can't take care of myself!" he shouted. "And you want to saddle me with two kids?"

"I am not _saddling_ you with anything," she retorted. "I offer a family to replace the one you lost. They will never know. Whatever memories of you, of Mary, of your life till now that you want to put into them, I can, and I will. They will love Mary and treasure her memory just as you do. And they will fight to avenge her beside you."

"But—" He choked on the rest of the sentence, and felt the damnable stinging of tears again.

He walked over to the blanket, and knelt beside it. The older boy—he was always going to be older, now, wasn't he? they'd never be twins again—was sturdy and strong, as far as John could tell anything about kids.

"I don't know anything about raising kids," he protested weakly, and that was when he knew he'd agreed to the job.

"You'll learn," Willow said, and she smiled. "I can promise you that."

"And their names?"

She hesitated. "It would be best if you named them. Names—they can be traced, and I don't want Buffy ever knowing how to find them."

"And you'll make it so they—" He swallowed hard. "So they'll remember Mary?"

"They already do." Again that sheepish little smile. "I started early."

"Did you bespell me? To make me—"

"John, do you know the first rule of witchcraft?" He shook his head. "Save the magic for the hard jobs." She walked over to him. "All you have to do now is say their names as you touch them, and it'll all be set."

"Christ," he muttered. He'd expected more rigmarole than this, expected more time to _think_.

"If it helps," she said, patting him on the shoulder, "you raise two fine young men."

"It helps." There was a long, awkward silence. "Willow—"

He looked over his shoulder to find her gone. Only the blankets and the boys remained. "I guess this means you're mine now, boys," he said quietly. What would have happened to them if Mary hadn't been killed? If he wasn't a hunter? "I can't promise you much, but it seems there's at least a little guarantee for you."

It took a few minutes to decide on names—he and Mary had never gotten so far—and his fingers trembled as he completed the spell. Little flickers of blue light sank into the boys' foreheads as he called each by his new name, and their sleeping posture relaxed into the pure relaxation of true sleep. The littler one's thumb found its way to his mouth.

_Mary, my love, wherever you are, help me._

He stood up. "Dean," he called loudly, and the bigger boy's eyes cracked open. "Get Sammy up. Time to move."

**_the end_**


	2. Chapter 2

Missouri opened the door, and her jaw dropped. "John—"

"You remember my sons," he said quickly, before she could say anything that might undo the spell. Dean, his arms full of a half-asleep Sammy, gave her the suspicious, sullen glare that he'd quickly learned to recognize as normal, for Dean and strangers.

John knew no normal child should react like that, but he couldn't tell if it was the demon blood or Dean's constructed memories that made him this way. He remembered Mary and remembered losing her (John had asked him, using it as an excuse to construct a code), and God only knew what that would do to a child. Hell, it had been tough enough on him.

Missouri must have read all that in his mind. "Of course I do," she said smoothly, betraying no sign that she'd never met them before. "Dean loves my cookies, don't you, Dean?"

John shot a look at Dean. It seemed that for a moment his eyes unfocused, and then they cleared, and he gave Missouri a hesitant smile. John suspected that meant that the memories in Dean's head were integrating the new knowledge. It didn't happen with Sammy, but Sammy was so young, he wouldn't remember this anyway. Hell, John didn't remember much of anything before he started kindergarten. "Chocolate chip," John said; he'd learned that one _real_ quick. "Right, buddy?" he added, giving Dean's hair the affectionate ruffle he remembered his own father giving him.

"I think I just happen to have some of those," Missouri said, stepping out of the way. "Come on in to the kitchen." Dean glanced at John for permission—it scared him, sometimes, just how _obedient_ this kid was, because he'd seen kids Dean's age and he didn't remember them being tiny little soldiers. John nodded, and Dean followed Missouri inside, hitching Sammy's weight up. "Put Sammy down in the high chair—"

"No, ma'am," Dean said, politely, protectively. "I've got him."

Missouri shot John a look. "You can't hold him and eat cookies," she pointed out, and before Dean could argue, did—something. Sammy came awake, jerking his head up off Dean's shoulder, and fought to get down. Dean sighed and lowered him to the floor. "Now, me and your daddy need to talk, so why don't you take the cookie jar—" she pushed it into Dean's arms "—and your brother and go out in the yard and play. Don't be scared of ol' Elvis, he can't bite. If you can wake him up, he might even play with you some."

Dean looked at John, utterly confused by this woman issuing orders, but John gave him another nod and he obediently took Sammy's hand and led him through the big French doors.

"John Edward Winchester, what in God's name is going on?" Missouri hissed, whirling on him with enough ferocity to scare—well, to scare a Marine. "Did you steal those kids?"

"No! Why would I—"

"I've seen men who lost less do more," she said, "and you _did_ lose your baby too—"

"I wouldn't kidnap someone else's kids!"

"Then where—oh, my." She must have read something in his brain. He hated when she did that. "I'll make tea. You talk."

"Just read it," he said wearily.

"Some things are better told," she replied. "Sit down and talk."

He collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table, and noticed, with a bit of weary satisfaction, that he had automatically taken the chair that gave him the best view of the boys in the backyard, even though it put him with his back to the door. Maybe he was getting the hang of this fatherhood business. "I went to visit Mary's grave, and when I went to the car, there was a woman in it." He explained it mechanically, everything that he could remember—the witch named Willow and her concern for the well-being of a raped Slayer (whatever that was) and the necessity of protecting her children.

"Half-demon?" Missouri asked quietly, setting out the tea set as if he were fancy company.

"No sign yet."

"She may have buried that part of them when she altered their memories." She began to pour tea. "How on earth did she find you?"

"She said you told her. She was a witch, and she called you 'Lady' Missouri—" Her hand jerked, just a bit. "—and she said you were the one who told her about me. Told her that I would raise them the way they needed. Raise them into good men."

Missouri set the teapot on the tray. Her hand was shaking. "It's true, I work magic sometimes," she said finally, looking out the window into the backyard, where Sammy was wrestling with her antique hound under Dean's watchful eye. "Little rituals, mainly, purifications and protections. It's not my primary gift. But I don't know anybody named Willow. Never have." She flashed him a smile. "Got a cousin named Ivy."

"Missouri—"

"There have been witches powerful enough to bend time," she went on. "I don't know any. Not now."

"I—" This was going to sound crazy. "I'm not sure she's been born yet."

"You said she had white hair—"

"Not that kind of white. She looked— I don't think she was more than thirty. If she was that. She was young."

Missouri studied him. "Instinct is a powerful thing, John. Don't doubt it." She shot another glance out the window. "You're gonna need it with those two."

"I was afraid of that."

"You don't think you can handle them?"

"I don't know shit about raising kids, Missouri!"

"Language."

He glared at her. "I'm not a father. Mary and I—we never—" He stopped. "They're not mine, Missouri. How can I—"

"Oh, don't give me that love-only-blood nonsense, John Winchester," she snapped at him. "Love ain't about biology. My mama raised thirteen kids and only gave birth to three of us, and I'd shoot anybody who said those other ten weren't my brothers and sisters. You accepted those boys. You named them. They're yours now, and you'll learn to love them. You just gotta give it some time."

He sat there, staring at his tea—God, he hated tea, and she damned well _knew_ it. "It's not just them. It's me. I—" He stopped, searching for words; Missouri remained silent, waiting. "I remember grabbing Sammy out of the crib and putting him in Dean's arms and ordering Dean to leave the house. I remember the way Dean didn't speak for months after she died and how Sammy screamed if they got separated. And I know none of it _ever happened_."

"Maybe that was Willow's gift to you."

"Gift? Fucking with my head?"

For once she didn't call him on the profanity. "She may have thought it would be easier for you this way. And it might be easier for you, too. You won't slip up and say something you'll regret. And maybe it'll help you start seeing them as your sons."

"How do you know I ever will?"

"Because Willow told you so."

"Huh?"

"They wouldn't be good men if they were raised by a man they thought hated them." She sipped her tea, and for several moments they sat there watching the boys and the dog. "You're gonna have to keep them from other hunters, John. Keep them isolated."

"What?" He was just now starting to make friends, learn people's names—have somebody to drink with, if nothing else. It wasn't like having a family, nothing ever would be, but it was human contact, and it made this life easier. "But—"

"Make new contacts, people who don't know you and Mary didn't have children. If any hunter finds out what they are— John, they're not going to see two little boys. They're not going to see your sons. They're going to see demons. And hunters _kill_ demons."

**_the end_**


	3. Chapter 3

The overly-cheerful tones of his cell phone pulled him out of a tangle of pain and nightmares that wasn't sleep but was deeper than a doze. John reached to the nightstand, triggering a cascade of agony down a back that was getting too old for this shit, and slapped wood veneer until he found the phone. "What?" he growled into it—then realized he hadn't pressed the right button and hit it again. "_What?_"

"It's Missouri, John. Is Dean with you?"

He sat up, ignoring the pain. "No. Sent him on a ghost chase in Arizona. Why?"

"We've got trouble."

"Trouble?" he echoed. He'd triple-checked that job before sending Dean off on his own. It was a basic salt-and-burn, nothing more, nothing _really_ dangerous, hopefully just the thing to get the boy to focus on something other than missing his brother without him getting in over his head. The barfights were getting out of control. "What kind of—"

"It's Buffy Summers. The Slayer."

"I don't know any—" Abruptly, he realized that he _did_. Not personally, but— In a heartbeat he was fully awake, and suddenly cold, despite the stuffy heat of the hotel, and there was a familiar knot in his gut, the one he got whenever one of the boys got hurt. "_The_ Buffy? Willow's Buffy?"

"That one. John—it— I just heard from a contact of mine, John. She's dead."

For a long moment all he remembered was Willow's desperate _We need her alive_, and his first thought was that the trauma of rape followed by losing her children had been too much for her. "It didn't work?"

"It's not that. When she died— John, she never had any children."

He hung up on her and punched in Dean's number. Missouri would understand.

"Yeah," Dean answered groggily.

"It's me."

"Dad?" Dean was instantly alert.

"Is everything okay?"

"Yeah, fine, what's up?" He sounded better, at least. Not so sullen. He'd been channeling his inner—

Sammy. Sammy was closer to Sunnydale. If this was having a ripple effect— "Go check on your brother."

"_What?_" Dean yelped.

"You heard me—"

"Dad, you told me not to even _mention_ him—"

"I changed my mind!" he roared. "Don't let him know you're there, just make sure he's okay!"

"All right, all right, but what about the—"

"Call Caleb and have him finish it. I need you to check on your brother _now._"

"Dad, is something—"

"_Now, Dean!_"

"Yes, sir."

* * *

It took him a couple of days to make the trip—his bruised back couldn't handle sitting in the truck for more than a couple of hours at a time. He was calling Dean at every stop, and every time Dean answered the phone, there was more worry in his voice, a tone John much preferred to hear aimed at Sammy, so he finally lied and told Dean he'd wrenched his back again and was heading to Bobby's for first aid and a research-and-repair session. When Dean had skulked around Stanford long enough to be convinced that Sammy was okay, he'd head that way to check on his old man. It would only buy John a couple of extra days, though, and that was _if_ he got there first and _if_ Bobby felt like being used as an alibi.

He drove straight to Sunnydale without checking a map, without a single wrong turn, even though he hadn't been here since that day. The patch of forest where he'd once met a witch and been given his sons—Miller's Wood, if the map was right—was closer to town now.

He started at the public library, using their computers to search through obituaries— Good _God_, the death rate in this town was something else, more than double normal. And more than half those deaths came with supernatural telltales. There was no way one _girl_ could handle this. That she could handle _any_ of it—and the stories of assorted weirdness indicated she did—was a miracle.

But there was nothing. No obituary for anyone named Buffy, although there were two Bambis and a double handful of Brandys (assorted spellings). The closest he could find was an obit for a _Joyce_ Summers, just this past winter. A daughter named Buffy was listed as a survivor. The same Buffy? Maybe. How many people could there be who would inflict that name on their kid?

Someone had known she died, or Missouri wouldn't have found out. At the same time, someone had tried to hide it, or Missouri would have known as soon as it happened. Could they be trying to hide it from the normals? To what end? Dead was dead.

Unless, maybe, they were trying to make people think she still protected the town? The death rate hadn't spiked back up the way it should have, as best he could tell. The town seemed to be in severe denial about what killed its citizens, blind to the fact that their life expectancy was about twenty years below the national average. Seven funeral homes and twenty-five public cemeteries serving a town this size? He wasn't sure _Lawrence_ had that many.

He jotted down the name of the cemetery where Joyce Summers was buried. If they were smart, they would have salted and burned the body—but witches, even white witches, didn't always think like hunters. They might have just buried her—and if they had, it was probably close to her mother. Then he looked up directions. If the town had that many public cemeteries, it had to be hip-deep in private ones, and he couldn't afford to waste time asking for directions.

Not as long as there was a chance that something could happen to his boys.

* * *

The cemetery looked peaceful enough to the untrained eye, but a hunter's eyes saw the signs that Sunnydale was anything but peaceful: disturbed earth on gravesites; broken stones without evidence of "normal" teenage vandalism; older graves circled by dead zones; seven funeral tents in this cemetery alone, awaiting mourners; stones whose math did not bear close examination, since hardly any of them marked someone who made it past sixty. The cemetery itself was a silent witness. It was fairly new, none of the trees more than twenty years old, the wrought-iron fence of a style that screamed "eighties," and yet the only empty area was a section near the back.

He started at the borders of that empty section and walked through the markers, tracing them back towards the entrance, back in time. The rows weren't full, of course; here and there were plots that hadn't been filled yet, pairs bought by couples or groupings bought by families, and there were the usual gaps where the only markers were the tiny plastic ones left by the funeral home when the family couldn't afford a proper stone. Kind of an old-fashioned cemetery, given its age; most cemeteries since the sixties were all about those boring little plaques that could be easily mowed over.

Joyce was on the third row from the working edge, towards the southern wall. The stone was small and flat, a single woman's stone, and there wasn't another stone that said "Summers" anywhere around. John pulled the printed obit out of his pocket. No local family; that explained the solitary nature. And no husband listed, just two daughters. Maybe they hadn't been able to afford more.

Despite what Willow had told him, Buffy had never been real to him—just some shadow of things to come, some woman in a distant future whose life was as bad as his. He'd never thought of her as someone's little girl. As still _being_ a little girl. And now he stood at Joyce Summers' grave and realized that Buffy was her daughter, that this dead woman was his boys' real grandmother. Ties of blood that the boys didn't know about, ties waiting to reach out and strangle them—

Shit. He should have focused less on _Sammy going away_ and more on _Sammy being in California_. Told Sammy he could go to college, but only on the East Coast. If he'd gotten accepted by Stanford, he could have gotten accepted by any of the big schools back east. He'd gotten so lost in his panic...

He turned slowly around, looking for the grave that had to be there. The way he estimated the fill rate, there should have been a plot available somewhere nearby—

He was right. You could see the headstone from here. It was tucked out of the way, half hidden in the shade of the trees against the wall, but she was in sight of her mother. He walked over.

_Buffy Anne Summers, 1981-2001, beloved sister, devoted friend_. Followed by an incongruous _She saved the world, a lot._

Not quite a hero's monument. The "a lot" rather deflated the whole thing. More than most hunters got, though.

The dates, though... Only two years older than Sammy. Two years _younger_ than Dean.

Sons she never knew. Sons she apparently never _had_.

God, this was giving him a headache.

There was grass on the grave. She'd been dead a few months, then. That meant that if anything was going to happen, it would have _already_ happened. If Missouri had told him that—

He probably would still have panicked. Thanks to a ton of bad movies and TV shows, everybody knew that messing with time, even in little ways, could fuck up _everything_. Step on a butterfly and all that. And even now, standing here, he didn't understand. How could his boys still be here, perfectly fine, if their mother died before she could give birth to them?

Unless it was just a seriously delayed reaction. Was there anything he could do to prevent that kind of ripple from making Dean and Sammy wink out of existence? If they did, would he even remember them? What about the last twenty years? They'd both saved people—unwillingly, in Sammy's case, but even so, he was directly responsible for a handful of lives out there, and he'd researched ways for John and Dean to save a lot more. What would happen to those people if his boys suddenly were never there?

He wished there was someone he could take this to, someone to help him figure it out. Bobby Singer was the only person he could think of who had the brains for it, but Bobby didn't know that the boys weren't really his, he'd met Bobby the summer after. And while John knew he could explain things without going into the demon bits, he also knew that when Bobby started picking apart a puzzle, he damn well didn't stop until he had the whole picture.

Bobby loved those boys as much as John did, even if the cranky old fart would never admit it, but if he found out their _real_ father was a demon... John wasn't sure _what_ Bobby would do. Even considering the circumstances, even considering that the boys had passed every test he'd ever tossed at them—

_They're not going to see your sons. They're going to see demons. And hunters __kill__ demons._ Missouri had been right on that, at least.

Most of the hunters who might remember him from the two years before he got the boys were dead, and he'd cut off contact with the rest to an extreme that had cost him a lot of contacts later. The few who were still around—well, John was notorious now for taking the boys on the road with him instead of finding a relative. _Nobody_ out there—nobody who wasn't one of that handful of hunters, anyway—would believe that the boys weren't really his. Not with the stories that circulated about the Winchester family. It was so much a part of the Winchester reputation that even if those old contacts had argued, the rest of the world would just laugh at them.

Even so, he couldn't risk it. There were too many crazies out there. And if Dean and Sammy found out— He didn't know what that would do to them, if it would warp the magic and break their brains or worse. Especially not with Buffy dead.

"Who are you?"

He whirled around, startled and a little surprised that anybody had managed to sneak up on him.

Her hair was red and shorter, her eyes lighter, and her expression anything but serene, but he recognized her immediately. Willow Rosenberg. The witch.

She was younger, of course, just another little girl. The Willow who had brought him his boys hadn't been much older, but she'd been hardened by much more suffering than this one had seen. The beginnings were there—undoubtedly at least partially because of these two graves—but there was more, far more, to come. She might be a witch, but she was not yet a warrior.

_And if I tell her, if I try to warn her, she may never bring me the boys._

"I just wanted to pay my respects," he said.

She studied him a moment, eyes raking up and down him. "You're a hunter."

She already knew about hunters, then. How long had she been working with Buffy? She was barely twenty. How young did these Slayers get started? As young as he'd started his boys?

"You've never worked with us here," she went on. "Was it in L.A.?"

Something about the way she was looking at him made him wary of following that conversational lead, even into a lie. "No, I never worked with her," he replied. Simple lies were the best. "I knew her family, a long time ago." He tried to remember the dates on Joyce's headstone. He thought she'd been about the same age as Mary. "I went to school with Joyce."

"College?" Willow's voice was frosty. "So you knew Hank? Buffy's dad?"

He swallowed the surge of anger. He didn't like thinking about that bastard, and not just because he hated to be reminded that the boys weren't really his. What little Willow had told him about how the boys were conceived... Sure, the bastard might _just_ have been possessed, but there were other, more sinister possibilities. There were plenty of monsters walking the world in human shells. "Not college. School." He forced himself to smile. "Like I said, a _long_ time ago. We lost touch when Buffy was little." Not so much of a lie, really; she couldn't have been more than four or so when Willow brought him the boys.

He knew the gamble was successful when her expression softened, became a little confused. "Oh. Sorry. Joyce didn't— I mean, I don't know a lot about Joyce before they came here, except what Buffy told me. Did you just find out?"

"About a week ago. I thought— I mean, I couldn't believe they were both gone." He hesitated. "There wasn't a lot of time between them—was it related?"

"No," she said. Her voice was rough. The grief was still fresh. "Joyce had a stroke after brain surgery. Buffy— It was a fight."

He knew that tone of voice, too. Just because the death was for a good cause didn't make it any easier on the survivors. If Vietnam hadn't taught him that, trying to deal with Ellen Harvelle after Bill's death had. "I'm sorry," he said, those stupid words that people always said in these circumstances. "From what I've seen, Sunnydale must have been a lot safer with her here."

"She's not gone," Willow snapped. Her voice reminded him a bit of Sammy's when the kid dug his heels in and refused to be sensible. "She's just not here."

John was painfully familiar with denial. He'd been in denial over Mary for the better part of six months, in either set of memories. But that didn't sound like _just_ denial. "She's not going to come back." It came out harsher than he intended. He'd tangled with a couple of crazies who'd tried to pull off resurrections. It _never_ ended well. Zombies were the _fun_ end of that spectrum.

"Don't bet on it. We need her."

The same words she'd used—_would_ use—to make him accept the boys. "You can't," he said. "It's not going to—"

"I'll _make_ it work."

He just stared at her, wanting to deny it—but this was a witch who was powerful enough to bring two small children through time and erase their memories. She had taken a set of twins and made Dean four _years_ older than Sammy. If anybody could succeed at a resurrection, even this long after the fact...

_ What if the boys haven't been born _yet_, and that's why they're still here? Because Willow resurrects her and Buffy has them some time that's still in the future?_

God, this wasn't helping his headache at _all_. And being here, seeing Willow—having Willow see him and talk to him—

He automatically glanced at the ground to make sure he wasn't about to step on a butterfly. He was beginning to wish he'd never read that story. "I didn't mean to disturb you," he said finally. "I'll leave you to your—" Thoughts? Grief? Tears? There was just no polite way to phrase that. "Time for me to hit the road, anyway."

She gave him a smile that was probably intended to be brave, but to his jaded eyes just looked wobbly. "It was good of you to come," she said. "If you get the chance, in a couple of months—"

"It's a bad idea, Willow."

"I know. But we've got to try. We need her."

He glanced at the stone again. _We both do._ "It's a bad idea," he repeated, because every bit of experience told him that. And yet... "If you insist on trying—"

"I have to."

He should warn her away from it, give her a reason not to try—but all he could think of was the Willow he'd met (would meet?) that day in Lawrence, and those two little boys lying asleep on a blanket in the woods, and what might happen if she _didn't_. "Good luck," he said finally, and turned to leave.

He'd made it almost two rows away when she shouted, "Hey!" He glanced back. "I didn't tell you my name."

He didn't panic. He was very proud of that. He'd learned a lot since that day. "No," he said finally, giving her a small smile. "You didn't."

_So much for butterflies,_ he thought, walking away, leaving her standing there staring after him.

_**the end**_


End file.
